"Base station" posts

    Mobile World Congress 2012 Wrap Up

    Aviat Networks Booth at MWC 2012¡Hola! again from the final day at Barcelona, where close to 1500 companies have been busily showcasing their products and services since Monday.

    Once again microwave backhaul has featured highly with the main development being the widespread adoption of 1024QAM modulation. At least half a dozen new products now support this higher modulation level. Of course we are one of them, showing our new WTM 3200 all-outdoor radio. 1024QAM supports about 25 percent more throughput over the radio path compared to 256QAM, but it does come with a tradeoff in reduced system performance and increased interference sensitivity. These can be somewhat offset by using Adaptive Modulation, so if the link starts to struggle at 1024QAM it can drop back to a lower modulation until conditions improve.

    Small cell backhaul has also been a hot topic, with many vendors jockeying for position in this emerging application. Small cells are tiny base stations that can be fitted to lamp posts or the sides of buildings, covering just a few hundred square yards/meters and would provide enhanced coverage and capacity to the network. There is talk of there being literally millions of these small cells being deployed over the next five years, starting in 2014 or so, and the big challenge will be backhauling all that traffic.

    Multi-technology small cells (WiFi + LTE) are emerging to enable mobile offload directly at the outdoor mounted small cell. Offload solutions that offload traffic at the building and onto fiber/DSL are designed to relieve the RAN and backhaul networks. This approach however is designed to provide capacity relief to the RAN part of the network only and will use the same backhaul as LTE traffic. The intersection of mobile offload and outdoor mounted small cells will mean backhaul remains a critical part of the offload solution for some time to come.

    As with last year, there is still a huge proliferation of new LTE-enabled smartphone and tablet devices. More connections bring more opportunities. This is good for our business as mobile operators will need to upgrade their networks.

    Until next year!

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    Backhaul for the Mobile Broadband or Wireless Broadband Network

    iPad con dock y teclado inalámbrico

    Image via Wikipedia

    As 2G and 3G networks enter the upgrade path to 4G wireless, it will require that more than the base stations receive new wireless solutions. The path to LTE wireless—odds-on favorite to be the dominant 4G technology—is paved with increasing data demand from smartphones, iPads, other tablet PCs, electronic readers and probably some other intelligent mobile computing devices yet to be imagined.

    All these devices will place throughput demands on the base stations, which in turn will place greater demands on the mobile backhaul network. Even as 4G devices place demands on mobile backhaul, the 2G and 3G technologies will be in place for sometime, coexisting in the same networks with 4G. In these situations, IP/Ethernet will be the next-generation networks‘ transport technology of choice.

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